


make me better

by alifeofourown



Series: halloweentown au [1]
Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Gen, Ghost Niall, kid liam
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-24
Updated: 2012-10-24
Packaged: 2017-11-16 23:20:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/544938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alifeofourown/pseuds/alifeofourown
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Have you ever had a pet that's 'found a new home?'" he asks and Liam nods instantly. "Well…that's kind of like me, except for I didn't go to a new home. I stuck around a little bit."</p>
            </blockquote>





	make me better

**Author's Note:**

> The beginning was written last and it might not be a cohesive transition. My apologies but I cannot be bothered to fix as of this moment. To Rikki, Raina, Cam and Frankie for putting up with continuous copying and pasting of every little bit of this terrible fic. Happy (early) Halloween!

There's something about old houses that just scream horror film, even if they're the most boring house in the world. However, the same doesn't usually qualify for brand new houses, or at least not for those who have only had one family occupy the place before.  
  
That doesn't stop Liam from having a sense of unease as they finally move into the home. "You'll like it here," Liam's sister, Ruth, tells him as she carries a box of things into the home. He's just a little boy now, told to stay out of the way and to play with his toys as they get all of the boxes and furniture into the house. "It'll be a lot better than our old home."  
  
Liam's antsy despite it all and he keeps tugging on his father's trouser leg until he's told that he should go pick out his room, earning a sigh of frustration from his older sisters. "He'll be living here the longest," Liam's dad reminds them as the boy makes his way up the stairs.  
  
He pokes his way into all of the rooms, admiring them all before he picks the room closest to the attic door, one that he probably shouldn't pick but does anyway. It's one of the smaller rooms but that's not what Liam finds interesting. There's something about the room that feels different, that makes Liam just want to sit in it and relax because it's comfortable. Liam drops down to the floor of room and he sits there, imagining what it'll be like when he has it filled with his toys, his bed with the Toy Story duvet in the corner to keep him by the window, which is, in Liam’s opinion, the best place to sleep.  
  
Liam thinks so hard about all of this, how his room will look just like his old one did and how this place will be different, full of friends and people who he can talk to, ones who won’t make fun of him and tease him like they did back at his old school, that he completely misses the fact that he’s not alone in the room. He’s thinking so hard that he doesn’t notice the other person in the room until they speak.  
  
“Boo!”  
  
The boy jumps off the floor, heart racing as he looks around, because it’s definitely not any of his family members. None of them have Irish accents, and none of them ever say ‘boo’ to him. They know how easily scared he is and they try to keep him from freaking out at all costs.  
  
It’s only when his eyes land on... No, it can’t be... Liam stares across the room and his eyes lock onto a blonde teenager leaning back against the wall, only he isn’t really there. Liam blinks a bit and he tries to make his eyes focus, convinced that that’s the problem, but the boy doesn’t go away or get any clearer. It’s really weird.  
  
“Hello!” he says and Liam doesn’t move, feeling that uneasy feeling growing in his gut again, but it ebbs and fades whenever the boy speaks, like something about the Irish accent is comforting despite the creepiness of what Liam refuses to believe is a ghost in front of him. “I’m Niall! Pleased to meet ya!”  
  
Liam shakes a little bit as he stares at the translucent boy in front of him, his eyes wide with fright. "You terrified me," he whispers as he looks at him.  
  
"I'm sorry!" Niall replies with a sheepish grin. "I was just having some fun, yeah? Didn't mean to startle you, mate." He wants to reach out and touch the boy, to hold him still until he stops shaking but he can't do that. You can't really do that when you go right through someone.  
  
Niall watches as Liam holds up a hand to him, his fingers spreading out as if for Niall to take it, but Niall doesn't. Niall can't. Instead, he holds his hand up right against Liam's, his fingertips ghosting against Liam's as he watches the boy curiously. His hands are bigger against the small boy's hand, and when Liam pushes his hand forward and it goes right through Niall, the blonde winces.  
  
"Why can't I touch you?" Liam asks, staring at Niall with wide eyes, confusion and fear in his expression.  
  
Niall hesitates to reply, trying to figure out how to form his words properly. He's never had to explain to a kid why he's a ghost. "Have you ever had a pet that's 'found a new home?'" he asks and Liam nods instantly. "Well…that's kind of like me, except for I didn't go to a new home. I stuck around a little bit."  
  
Liam nods in understanding and Niall's surprised that such a young boy can understand, or at least try to understand what he's trying to convey. He's too small, his clothes oversized so that he's swimming in them and Niall tries to remember what it's like to change clothing every day, to slip into oversized jumpers and just get comfortable.  
  
He's startled from the thought when Liam speaks. A tiny voice, the hints of hesitation glaringly obvious as he says, "Will you be my friend?" And Niall doesn't know what to say. "All the kids at my old school were mean, but you're not mean. Will you be my friend?"  
  
"I…" Niall doesn't make promises. He doesn't do friendships. He scares people to keep them out of his old room and that's it. He has no idea when he's going to fade away, when he won't be a part of this world anymore, and Niall doesn't want to tell someone that he'll stick around when he's not sure of it himself. And yet he finds himself nodding a little bit to the boy, smiling at him. "I'll be your friend," he promises and Liam holds his pinky out to Niall to swear on it.  
  
Niall does everything in his power not to say no right then, not to just turn invisible and find some new place to haunt. Instead, he very carefully wraps his ghost finger around Liam's, making sure that he doesn't just slide it right through the boy's. Sure Liam can't feel it, just like Niall can't feel the warmth of Liam's finger around his own, but he can see it and that's what promises are all about in the end.  
  
Liam's face breaks out into a grin and Niall's glad that he's been able to put that smile on the little boy's face. He's glad that he didn't scare him off like he had been intending to do, because Liam's precious and when he smiles Niall's pretty sure he lights up the entire room. It's beautiful and innocent and everything Niall still wishes he was. "Friends," he tells Liam quietly.  
  
"Friends," Liam replies and he's beaming at this point, so Niall doesn't have the heart to tell him that he doesn't know how long this friendship will actually last.

~

  
Niall watches over Liam. He watches and waits for the boy to come home from school every day and he talks with him about everything that's happened at school, all the homework assignments that the teachers are giving and he makes Liam smile. That's the best part, when he manages to make Liam smile. He doesn't see it enough.  
  
And sometimes there are days where Liam comes home and Niall pops into his room only to be told to go away, that he doesn't want to see Niall that day, and Niall doesn't understand why. He stays, invisible, in a corner of Liam's room and watches as the boy curls up in his bed and cries and he wishes he could do something, that he could rub Liam's back and tell him it's going to be okay, that the kids will stop picking on him when he grows into his features and that there will be better schooling and better friends in the future, but Niall doesn't know Liam's future.  
  
When Liam finally wants to see him, though, Niall always comes back a little dimmer than before.  
  
Sometimes, in the dead of night, when Liam can't sleep, he and Niall sneak out to the backyard. It's something that Niall shouldn't do, considering how young the boy is and if his parents were to wake up and find an empty bed then all hell would break loose, but Niall just likes to make Liam smile, and he does that the best when Liam's got his hand pressed against the grass, palm up, and Niall's ghosting his hand just over it as they stare up and count the stars.  
  
"We'll be best friends forever," Liam whispers one night when he looks over at Niall. "You're my best friend." Niall's years older than Liam and he knows that best friends don't last, that things like heartache and new friends and relationships get in the way of all of it, but Liam's innocent and he doesn't know of such things, so he just smiles at Liam and nods.  
  
"Yeah. Best friends."

~

  
"Hey Niall," Liam says one day when they're spread out on his bed, Liam trying to do homework and Niall distracting him to the best of his ability.  
  
"Yeah, Li?" He keeps trying to steal the pencil out of Liam's hand, focusing his energy on letting him grab the object. He's too new of a ghost to move around objects, but someday he'll be able to steal writing utensils from Liam's hand, and until then he at least succeeds in annoying the boy.  
  
"Why aren't you real?" Niall tenses at the question and his hand freezes with the pencil stuck in the middle of it as if he'd been stabbed. Flashes of memory come back to him, a sound of crunched metal, intense pain, blinding white lights. He doesn't want to explain that to the boy.  
  
Eventually, Niall settles on a simple, "Because I was too cool to stay real. Had to level up."  
  
"You mean like in video games?" Liam asks as he looks at Niall with wide eyes, clearly attentive to whatever the teen says.  
  
"Yes, exactly like in video games." Niall grins a little at Liam before he rolls back on the bed. "Next time I'll turn into a dragon so I can fight off those kids at school for you."  
  
Liam stares at him like he's the most amazing thing he's ever seen. "Cool." Niall smiles fondly at the boy before he closes his eyes and imagines what life would’ve been like if he hadn’t been born the person he was and if he had grown up next door to Liam instead. It would’ve been a lot different, sure, but he would’ve been a good friend to the boy. He would’ve have had to hide all the time whenever Liam’s parents were around and Liam wouldn’t have to worry them by talking about an ‘imaginary friend’ when he was far too old to have one.  
  
They could’ve just been friends together, growing up and playing games like hide and seek or arguing over who got the last cookie that Liam’s mum had made for them. Maybe Liam would’ve convinced Niall to never start bleaching his hair and maybe he would’ve stayed a brunette. Maybe he would’ve never known the people he had and maybe he wouldn’t have gotten into that car.  
  
 _Too many maybes_ , Niall thinks as he opens his eyes and watches Liam, his tongue poked out just slightly as he works on what seems to be a particularly difficult maths problem. Maths had never been the boy’s strong point and Niall had helped him a lot with it, but as of late Liam had been asking to do it all on his own, growing independent and it made Niall smile. Niall was definitely attached to the boy and he wanted to be there for the rest of Liam’s life. Even if he was no longer a part of it, he wanted to watch over Liam and make sure that the boy was always safe.

~

  
Niall had been glowing as of late. Even Liam found the need to comment a lot on how bright Niall was, but the blonde didn’t spot any difference in the way his body shone. He chalked it up to the light. “What are we doing tonight, Ni?” Liam asks as he pushes aside his backpack. Weekends were always Liam’s favourite, especially after he finished up all of his schoolwork, and Niall knew this, so he couldn’t help but fondly look on at the way that Liam had earlier cheered in success at finishing up his schoolwork for the day.  
  
The way that Liam looks at Niall makes the ghost feel a little bit better about the whole situation, and if he could still really feel feelings, he would probably feel his whole insides warming up at the thought of how nice Liam was to him and how the boy had grown to accept him over the months that Niall had been in his life. “I think we should-“  
  
But Liam’s cuts him off, letting out a gasp as he stares at him with widened eyes. “What? What’s wrong?” Niall looks around the room and he doesn’t see anything different, nothing that would really stand out anyway. “Did I do something wrong, Liam?”  
  
“You’re glowing.”  
  
Niall’s heard this so much over the past week and a half that he doesn’t know why he’s bothering with it again. Still, he humours Liam by smiling a little bit and saying, “Am I now?” before he glances down at his hands with all intention of moving on from the topic rather quickly.  
  
Only this time it’s all different.  
  
His pale, translucent form is shimmering, almost as if someone had doused him in glitter and then stuck him out in the sun like one of those tragic vampires on those films that Liam’s oldest sister likes. “Liam,” Niall whispers, the awe in his voice standing out as he looks from his hands to the boy, and Liam looks scared. Up until now, Niall couldn’t see himself glowing and now he can and it’s obvious by the boy’s expression that Liam’s scared this means something bad. “I don’t know what this is.”  
  
“Whatever it is say no!” The look of panic on Liam’s face throws Niall into panic and he runs his fingers over his arm, trying to shake off this glowing whatever that’s happening all over him. He can’t manage to do it, and he feels warm. For the first time since he died he feels warm and it’s perfect and terrible all at once. Niall wants to bask in the feeling of being warm, of feeling like he’s almost turning human again, but at the same time he knows that this is something bad. There’s no way that he can feel this good without consequences.  
  
“Liam,” Niall begins and he feels like he can almost taste things again, like his senses are coming back and he can smell the scent of the Payne family’s air freshener and can taste the air and how fresh it is. It’s strange, something that he doesn’t want because it means he’s changing and probably not for the best.  
  
And Liam’s screaming. He’s begging and pleading saying, “No don’t take him! He’s all I have!” and Niall doesn’t even know who he’s talking to but he’s silently hoping the same thing as he tries to find the words to say the same thing. He’s not supposed to move on. He’s not supposed to be done with all of this. He’s supposed to stay with Liam and protect the boy forever because he promised Liam he would. He promised himself that he’d never leave Liam’s side.  
  
Niall doesn’t know how much longer he has. He’s glowing brighter than the torch that Liam keeps tucked under his pillow to read comics late after lights out and it’s not good because he feels too hot, like he’s going to burst, and Liam’s shouting his name. He opens his mouth to speak, to tell Liam that it’s going to be okay and that he’ll be fine and that nothing bad is going to happen but he can’t say any of this because he doesn’t know if it’s true.  
  
What he does know is true, what he knows can never change despite what’s happening to him right now is what he manages to say to Liam, curling his fingers into fists as he looks at the boy, his eyes a piercingly bright blue compared to how pale they usually are.  
  
“You’ll always be my best friend.”  
  
The words get Liam to stop screaming and tears stream down the boy’s cheeks as he stares at him. Niall can feel his eyes burning, prickling and he forces himself to keep them wide open, to look at the boy that he’d befriended for one moment longer before the pain gets to be too much and he has to squeeze them shut.  
  
The image of Liam stays behind his eyelids for just a moment and then everything goes white.


End file.
